Robert Gates might have little time for President Obama or Joe Biden but the
ex-defence secretary has blindspots of his own

Given that it is supposedly about the life and times of a man driven solely by devotion to God and country, the title of Robert M Gates’s contentious autobiography comes across as a touch self-serving. “Duty” it proclaims portentously, above a picture of the former US defence secretary staring out from the cover.

His book has caused quite a stir in the United States for its unsparing portraits of his political superiors. This is odd, because from the beginning he almost falls over himself in his effort to preach old-school values like honour and loyalty. Gates is a soldier and, we are told, these are “Memoirs of a Secretary at War”. Actually, he wasn’t really a soldier but a spy, rising to be deputy director of the CIA. He then had a brief time as president of Texas A&M university, before replacing Donald Rumsfeld as George W Bush’s head of defence in 2006.

The book opens as he is approached for the role by Steve Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser, and the first few pages hint at what will follow. “If the president thinks I can help, I have no choice but to say yes. It’s my duty,” he tells Hadley, and us, on page four. Just in case we don’t get the message, he adds, “The troops out there were doing their duty – how could I not do mine?” For good measure he then details the email he sent his students announcing his departure: “I am obligated to do my duty. And so I must go.”

So Secretary Gates goes to war. Actually, several wars: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the Bin Laden raid. He has a ringside seat to Guantánamo, WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring and the Iranian nuclear threat. Fascinating though his perspectives are on these pivotal issues, for the first few chapters all I could hear was Gene Kelly’s mantra from the opening of Singin’ in the Rain: “I’ve had one motto which I’ve always lived by: Dignity. Always dignity”. Replace dignity with duty, and you have the measure of Gates.

Quickly – and I suspect unwittingly – Gates grants an insight into the markedly different priorities of those tasked with managing the US military leviathan. There’s an illuminating passage in which Gates discusses the US Air Force’s highly controversial drone attacks in Afghanistan. The USAF high command are dragging their feet over expanding the project, and you wait for Gates to detail the complex legal and moral issues that attend the remote-control killing machines. “I spent some time with the drone pilots, who had a number of gripes,” he writes. “They had a two-hour round-trip commute every day from their homes at Nellis air force base… there was no place you’d want to eat… there was no physical fitness facility.” Gates then proudly recounts how “within months of my visit, the Air Force extended the hours of the child care centre at Nellis, funded a medical and dental clinic… and began construction of a new food outlet and dining facility”. Duty, always duty.

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At times Gates displays a lack of self-awareness that flirts with parody. And at others he kisses it full on the lips.

He recounts the occasion President Obama closed a sensitive discussion on military deployment to the Middle East with the words: “For the record, and for those of you writing your memoirs, I am not making any decisions about Israel or Iran.” Gates responded: “I was offended by his suspicion that any of us would write about such sensitive matters.” Even though he had just written about them.

The reason Gates’s book has been controversial in the US isn’t due to his revelations over operational procedure, but his commentary on his former political masters. His sense of honour doesn’t seem to extend to those members of Obama’s team who took the gamble of keeping him in his post after the transition from the Bush years.

Vice-President Joe Biden is dismissed as “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”. Obama is portrayed as calculating, devoid of “passion, especially when it came to the two wars”.

But Gates is fairly balanced in his analysis of the major issues. Nor is his account wholly self-serving. He is especially candid on the death of Osama bin Laden, admitting he advised against the raid. At the last minute he changed his mind, and informed the president he supported the assault. “The president had made the decision to go ahead an hour or so earlier,” he confesses.

Obama and Bush’s former minister for war isn’t one of life’s great storytellers. But he still has a great story to tell. Gates did his duty. It would have been nice if he could have trusted us to figure that out for ourselves.